[podcast]http://thinkingaccessible.com/podcasts/web_accessibility_podcast_two.mp3[/podcast]

Transcript of the podcast:

[Intro music] Welcome to podcast two of Thinking Accessible. On today’s podcast I will briefly talk to you about web accessibility.

The first thing I want to say about web accessibility is don’t assume that people with disabilities don’t use the Internet. (or that they won’t want to access your site.) Because they actually do use the Internet in different ways and in different capacities. Now since people with visual, auditive and some physical impairments use the Internet, then naturally you would want them to access your information. You would want the maximum amount of people to have access to your content and therefore it makes sense to not alienate any big percentage of the users, right? Right! This said the first step in doing this is by following the basic guidelines of web standards. I will be talking about several topics relating to web accessibility through this podcast. You can also check out more content at my blog at thinkingaccessible.com

I hope you can join me as I attempt to make accessibility concepts as easy to understand as possible for novice web developers and the veterans.

To start of, I would like to comment on IE6 and designing for IE6. Although IE6 is a dying browser, a lot of websites still use it and we still, as developers, have to consider the approximately 16% of users that still use IE6 (as their primary browser). Unfortunately IE6, the reason why it is not a friendly for developers is that it’s not developed considering web standards. I personally have had nightmares due to IE6 because of the layout. When I design (a website) I use Firefox as my primary browser, but usually when I go to check on IE6 (and even IE7) , the layout is off.

But if your site is accessible, then you don’t need to really worry about IE6 too much, because at least your content is there. It’s visible and accessible to everybody. Sure it’s not pretty, but at least you can now start hacking it for IE6 and IE7. By hacking, I’m referring to the comments in the (HTML) code specifically made to detect Internet Explorer.

The latest browser from Microsoft is IE8. You won’t have the same problems as in previous browsers because it has changed to respect web standards. Now that’s a relief!

[Exit music] That’s about all I wanted to talk about today. Until next time! This is Rocío for Thinking Accessible.

Audio from ccMixter entitled “Café Connection“ by Morgantj under Creative Commons.